Is Email The New Circular File
By Rob Wright, Chief Editor, Life Science Leader
Follow Me On Twitter @RfwrightLSL
By Rob Wright
So you think you have problems cleaning out your email. I just had a conversation with Roger Connors, author of the several books in the field of management and leadership. He was telling me he recently had to take a few weeks off. When he got back to his computer, he had thousands of emails. Roger is in the process of putting together an article for the magazine. With thousands of emails to sort through to find the information I had sent him, I guess he figured it would be easier just to pick up the phone and give me a call. Yes, I answer my own phone. This can be difficult for a writer, especially when we are in the middle of constructing what is sure to be the next Pulitzer!
If you have a burning question, give me a call. But don’t be surprised if I ask you to also send me an email. I do not do this to pollute my email in-box., I do it because I consider myself to be visual. I like to have something I can look at to process your ideas and suggestions. Perhaps this was the case in my previous career when working with pharmaceutical management. The phrase “can you send me an email on that” was thrown around at meetings ad nauseam. “Send me an email” seemed to be code for, “we appreciate you bringing this problem to our attention, but we don’t want to deal with it now. So, send me an email, and I will get around to it sometime in the next century.” For some, email has become the new means of politely putting someone’s ideas or suggestions in the circular file. That is what it felt like to me anyway.
The other day, I was interviewing Jeff Chalay, a chief medical officer for a small biotech company. During our conversation we got a little sidetracked and started talking about email. He was describing to me one of Outlook’s meeting features and the various choices when you receive an invite to attend. I am very familiar with this, but couldn’t bring myself to interrupt his description as he proceeded to “go off” on the stupidity of the features. “Why do I need to send any response, unless I will not be attending the meeting? All this does is clutter up my boss’s email inbox.” Good point. He started to tell me about the reply all feature before catching himself. I think it started like, “And another thing, I think that reply all….” Perhaps I will put together a protocol for when to use reply all in an email. Here goes. Never, ever use reply all. End of protocol. I just looked at my boss’s deleted messages folder for a couple of days. About 900 emails, deleted, unopened. Fortunately, none were from me.